Emily Benedek grew up in Belmont, MA, and graduated from Harvard College, where she played on the college’s first women’s varsity soccer team. Her articles and essays have appeared in Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, The Dallas Morning News, and Tablet Magazine among others, and have been broadcast on NPR and WFAA-TV News. Her first book, The Wind Won’t Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.), was a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. She is the author of Beyond the Four Corners of the World: A Navajo Woman’s Journey (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.), and a memoir, Through the Unknown, Remembered Gate (Schocken). She is also the author of Red Sea (St. Martins Press), a thriller about terrorism and counter-terrorism. She has two daughters and lives in New York City.

Benedek has written extensively about the West, both in her books about Navajo and Hopi Indians, and also as a prize-winning reporter in Arizona covering politics, banking, and business. She penned a long investigative piece about Jerry and Rita Alter, a New York couple in Cliff, NM, who stole a de Kooning painting off the wall of the University of Arizona Museum of Art and kept it in their home for 35 years. She helped jazz musicians play on the streets of NYC during Covid, wrote about it, and helped bring out an album commemorating the effort, titled, Sidewalkin’. Her latest book, Hometown Betrayal: A Story of Secrecy and Sexual Abuse in Mormon Country, brought her back out West, to the tiny town of Clarkston, UT.